Copyright Law And Quotes

“Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses
like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work
that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.”

— Lawrence Lessig

“The obvious point of Conrad's cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: No one ever died from copyright circumvention. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do.”

— Lawrence Lessig

“We're on the path of creating monopoly business practices out of copyright law.”

— Robin Gross

“We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying.”

— Lawrence Lessig

“It's the golden age of French cinema again but it's because Sarkozy had the guts to push through copyright law.”

— Harvey Weinstein

“When you have a group of engineers and designers, they are not exactly the best to deal with copyright law.”

— Chad Hurley

“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”

— Mark Twain

“If we're talking about someone creating something new, those rights are fairly well defined (in the United States, at least) under existing copyright law. But then there's often discussion about the rights of people who produce works under work-for-hire arrangements, which can be far more subtle and nuanced.”

— Chris Roberson

“In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.”

— Northrop Frye

“Anything illegal under Chinese law is, of course, not protected by copyright.”

— Rebecca MacKinnon

“National law has no place in cyberlaw. Where is cyberspace? If you don't like banking laws in the United States, set up your machine on the Grand Cayman Islands. Don't like the copyright laws in the United States? Set up your machine in China. Cyberlaw is global law, which is not going to be easy to handle, since we seemingly cannot even agree on world trade of automobile parts.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

“Copyright law is a dinosaur, ill-suited for the landscape of today's media.”

— Kaskade

“I think the reality is that copyright law has for a very long time been a tiny little part of American jurisprudence, far removed from traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, and that made sense before the Internet. Now there is an unavoidable link between First Amendment interests and the scope of copyright law. The legal system is recognizing for the first time the extraordinary expanse of copyright regulation and its regulation of ordinary free-speech activities.”

— Lawrence Lessig

“Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.”

— Mark Twain

“If I take that person and play them as a record I'm becoming not only a conductor and composer of collage, but at the same time I'm looking at a whole layer of what goes into copyright law, who owns those memories, who owns the way that that sound gets remixed and transformed and above all how much fun it is to actually just mess with other people's stuff.”

— DJ Spooky

“Anyone who knows anything should know you cannot take a master track of a recording and write another song over the top of it. You just can't do that. You can call it a tribute or whatever you want to call it, but it's against the law. That's a problem with some of the younger generation, they don't understand the concept of intellectual property and copyright.”

— Don Henley

“What I really think is that our current model of copyright is fundamentally broken. We badly need to replace it with a different system for remunerating creators, which gets it the hell out of the face of the public (who were never aware of it to begin with in the pre-internet dead tree era). Unfortunately, the current copyright model is enshrined in international trade treaty law, making it almost impossible to work around.”

— Charles Stross

“We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered "printing." Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years.”

— Lawrence Lessig